Criminals Laugh at Gun Control Laws

Monty Python’s John Cleese reacted to the failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump by, naturally, pointing the finger at the NRA and calling for gun control. (There are some reports that the now dead assassin had explosives in his car. Let’s not forget the Oklahoma City bomber killed 168 people including children in a daycare center and injured over 680 others using fertilizer and fuel oil.)

There are a lot of rifles in the United States, nearly 30 million. Other than in cities like Chicago where guns our outlawed, 99.9999 percent of all owned guns were not used to kill anyone on July 13th. So, let’s outlaw guns for 99.9999 percent of people who own rifles who have never killed anyone so we can stop all crazy people who decide to kill people, thus, leaving all innocent gun owners vulnerable to the crazies.

Do criminals follow gun laws? Criminals love and laugh at gun control laws. It makes their job of being criminals easier. That’s why crazies enter schools. Gun-free zones are soft targets. There are numerous stories of people with guns protecting themselves and their property. The fact that a person, home, school, or business might be armed serves as a great deterrent.

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Every day people kill other people with guns, knives, pushing them in front of trains, burning, automobiles, and even water by drowning. These are not going to stop with new laws. Murder is already against the law. People are the problem, not guns. Recent surveys have determined that around 40% of adult Americans own a gun or live with someone who does. Criminals are innovative. With the right equipment and know-how, guns can be manufactured in any small workshop. The same is true with explosives, knives, and bows and arrows. Even when purchasing a gun legally, criminals purchase them illegally.

To show that guns are not the problem, decades ago, many public schools had shooting clubs. According to John Lott:

Until 1969 virtually every public high school—even in New York City—had a shooting club. High school students in New York City carried their guns to school on the subways in the morning, turned them over to their homeroom teacher or the gym coach during the day, and retrieved them after school for target practice. Club members were given their rifles and ammunition by the federal government. Students regularly competed in citywide shooting contests for university scholarships.

Even today there are “more than 2,000 high-school rifle programs across the United States. In 2015, 9,245 students in 317 schools across three states participated in the USA High School Clay Target League. In 2018, participation had increased 138% with 21,917 students from 804 teams in 20 states.” Bethel Park High School, the school where the would-be assassin who tried to kill Trump attended, has a shooting club.

There are many who believe the Second Amendment is the problem. For example, actor Mark Hamill, best known for his role as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars series and the voice of the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series has said some things about the Second Amendment that defy history, the Constitution, and logic. In a tweet, he wrote the following:

Don’t get me wrong, as a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment—I believe in every American’s right to own a musket.

Piers Morgan said something similar:

The Second Amendment was devised with muskets in mind, not high-powered handguns and assault rifles. Fact.

See if you can find the word “musket” in the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

“The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed says it all.” Even without this constitutional right, we have the right to bear arms to protect ourselves from people who want to do us harm. Such a right does not originate with civil governments. The Second Amendment was included in the Constitution to ensure the already existing right to “keep and bear arms.” Hamill and Morgan should study some of their own histories before they write on a subject like the Second Amendment.

“The right to have arms in English history is believed to have been regarded as a long-established natural right in English law, auxiliary to the natural and legally defensible rights to life. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court remarked that at the time of the passing of the English Bill of Rights there was ‘clearly an individual right, having nothing whatsoever to do with service in the militia’ and that it was a right not to be disarmed by the crown and was not the granting of a new right to have arms.”

The Second Amendment doesn’t say what type of “arms” is included in the right to bear them. There’s a reason for this. Our founders knew that the definition of “arms” can change over time. What was considered “arms” in the 18th century differed from what would have been defined as “arms” in the 13th century. The Constitution was designed to be a document for the ages, not just for the late 18th century.

Following Hamill and Morgan’s logic, the freedoms of speech and press found in the First Amendment should be limited to a town crier, horses, and footmen to carry dispatches, quill pens for writing, and actual printing presses. This would mean setting type by hand, rolling ink over the type, and pressing the paper on the raised letters, one sheet at a time. Since we don’t “press” paper over inked type today we can’t appeal to the First Amendment’s right to “freedom of the press.”

Freedom of speech has dramatically changed with microphones, recording devices, television, films, streaming, etc. Should these new communication devices be prohibited because they weren’t available in the 18th century?

If the Second Amendment was only for muskets, then it was also only for parchment and literal printing presses. Our founders knew better. Ideals transcend technology and innovation. Ideals are for the ages.

The Case for America’s Christian Heritage

It’s not enough to relive history. There’s much work before us to reset the foundation stones of a firm reliance on Divine Providence. We need to heed the words of Benjamin Franklin who quoted Psalm 127:1 during the drafting process of the Constitution: “except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it,” and “that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel.” The principles that were true and necessary centuries ago for building nations are equally true and necessary today.

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No one in the 18th century, or even in the last decade of the 20th century, could have conceived of printing electronically and people having portable printers in their homes. Printing has made more technical advancements since the First Amendment was drafted than have the development of “arms.”

Someone from the 18th century could easily recognize a modern-day handgun and rifle and learn to load and shoot them in a matter of minutes but would be stymied by a laptop computer and software used to “typeset” a book with no hard type that could be turned into an electronic file that in the end could print a million copies of a book in days or send the document around the world in a matter of seconds.

We are beginning to see a chipping away of the free speech and freedom of the press provisions found in the First Amendment under the guise of stopping “misinformation.” And who gets to determine what’s misinformation? The Left is OK with limiting speech and the “press” for people they disagree with on policy and moral issues. We’re seeing it everywhere—from university campuses to social media platforms. This might be the reason our Founders thought it necessary to include the Second Amendment because when a government and those who control the free flow of information suppress speech, wholesale tyranny can’t be far behind.

Tens of millions of people with rifles might serve as a peaceful reason why a government might decide not to use military force against a population of gun owners. Knowing this, governments, even our government, will use other means to control us, and that’s happening at this moment, and it’s scary.

American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources